SPIDER: A MULTI-AGENT ARCHITECTURE FOR INTERNET DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEM

摘要

There had been much work done using agents for distributed systems that support E-Commerce and information retrieval systems but practically little or no work has been done for utilizing the massive computing resources available on the Internet to provide a computational platform for solving large complex scientific problems as opposed to running the applications on a supercomputer or a large cluster computing facility. This paper proposes a multi-agent architecture and protocols to support resource sharing and large-scale computation through the Internet. To test the feasibility of the proposed architecture and protocols, we have implemented a prototype using the IBM Aglets. We measured its performance by comparing the running time of a distributed matrix multiplication to a sequential program and the PVM [8]. The results indicate that the multi-agent based architecture can offer better performance for large problem sizes.